“What do you get if you cross a Goblin with a Vampire?
A dead Goblin.”
Taken from the big Orcish joke book
Dear readers,
Having discussed Red Deck Wins in quite some detail over the last few weeks, it’s time to turn to some of the other Extended decks which you might like to consider. So today, I’m going to look at an old archetype which offers more options than any other – from pure beatdown to old-fashioned control through superior card drawing to krazy kombo tricks. I am referring, of course, to the Goblin deck.
There have been two professional Extended tournaments since the format was dramatically changed by the banning of Tinker, Oath of Druids, Ancient Tomb, Grim Monolith, Hermit Druid and Goblin Recruiter. One was Pro Tour: Columbus, and I’ll be impressed if you remembered that the other one was Grand Prix: Okayama back in January 2004. The only major Extended deck which was not present at that Grand Prix was Affinity. All the other major decks – Madness, Red Deck Wins, Life, Reanimator, Rock, Psychatog – were present. As Japan is the home of the best Red Deck designers in the world and many of the best players too, we should bear the results of that Grand Prix almost as seriously as those of the much more recent Pro Tour. So let’s start by having a look at how Goblin decks did at those tournaments.
At Pro Tour: Columbus, there were 55 Goblin decks, 16 of which made it through to Day 2. Goblins was the second most popular deck. The top placed Goblin deck finished 4th.
At Grand Prix: Okayama, 9 out of 64 decks with large numbers of Goblins in them made the second day. Goblins was the second most popular deck, 2 Goblin decks were in the Top 8, and one actually won the whole tournament.
In both cases, Goblins were more popular than Red Deck Wins, Madness, Reanimator, Aluren, Desire and Life. So even if the idea of summoning a Goblin Warchief is not one that rocks your world, you’ll need to be prepared for it to succeed in the qualifiers.
Not that this reflects one particular kind of Goblin deck being successful. You want Goblins? Here are four different decklists, all of which proved successful in tournament play, and which reflect very different ideas about how to get the best out of your Goblins:
Osamu Fujita
Go Anan Deck (8-0, Day 1, GP: Okayama)
19 Mountain
4 Goblin Burrows
4 Mogg Fanatic
1 Mogg Raider
1 Goblin Sledder
3 Sparksmith
4 Goblin Piledriver
4 Goblin Warchief
4 Skirk Prospector
4 Goblin Matron
4 Siege-Gang Commander
2 Gempalm Incinerator
3 Goblin Ringleader
3 Blood Frenzy
Sideboard
3 Powder Keg
2 Flametongue Kavu
4 Fledgling Dragon
2 Earthquake
3 Damping Matrix
1 Sparksmith
Kazumasa Shiki
Goblin Bidding (winner, GP: Okayama)
8 Mountain
4 Bloodstained Mire
4 Sulfurous Springs
3 Shadowblood Ridge
2 Swamp
4 Skirk Prospector
4 Mogg Fanatic
4 Goblin Piledriver
4 Goblin Matron
4 Goblin Warchief
1 Goblin Sharpshooter
2 Gempalm Incinerator
4 Goblin Ringleader
2 Siege-Gang Commander
3 Chrome Mox
3 Powder Keg
3 Patriarch’s Bidding
1 Vampiric Tutor
Sideboard
4 Cabal Therapy
1 Dralnu’s Crusade
1 Oversold Cemetery
1 Vampiric Tutor
2 Perish
2 Terminate
4 Pyrostatic Pillar
Olivier Ruel
(4th place, Pro Tour: Columbus)
4 Mountain
2 Swamp
4 Sulfurous Springs
4 Rishadan Port
4 Shadowblood Ridge
4 Bloodstained Mire
3 Mogg Fanatic
4 Skirk Prospector
4 Goblin Piledriver
1 Sparksmith
1 Goblin Sharpshooter
4 Goblin Matron
4 Goblin Warchief
4 Goblin Ringleader
1 Siege-Gang Commander
4 Cabal Therapy
2 Chrome Mox
4 Burning Wish
2 Living Death
Sideboard
1 Chainer’s Edict
1 Patriarch’s Bidding
1 Perish
3 Duress
3 Cranial Extraction
1 Decompose
1 Tendrils of Agony
1 Meltdown
1 Reanimate
1 Pyroclasm
1 Cave-In
Gerard Fabiano
Goblins (41st place, Pro Tour: Columbus)
9 Mountain
2 Swamp
4 Bloodstained Mire
4 Sulfurous Springs
3 Rishadan Port
1 Siege-Gang Commander
1 Sparksmith
3 Goblin Matron
1 Goblin Sharpshooter
3 Goblin Ringleader
4 Goblin Warchief
4 Goblin Piledriver
4 Mogg Flunkies
4 Mogg Fanatic
3 Goblin Goon
3 Skirk Prospector
4 Aether Vial
4 Cabal Therapy
Sideboard
3 Terminate
2 Flametongue Kavu
1 Wasteland
4 Pyrostatic Pillar
3 Fledgling Dragon
2 Powder Keg
Before I go on, I’m aware that not everyone reading this will have been lucky enough to see one of these Goblin decks in action. I’ve included match reports from the Pro Tour and Grand Prix in the bibliography at the end of this article, so if you’re scratching your head about why Goblin Matron is in the deck, or how any of these decks could possibly be any good, have a look at those before reading on.
You will notice, of course, that the core of all of these decks is the same. They all feature Mountain, Skirk Prospector, Mogg Fanatic, Goblin Matron, Goblin Warchief, Goblin Piledriver, Sparksmith, Goblin Ringleader, and Siege-Gang Commander.
Three of the four decks have Black cards, though Ruel’s deck has a far heavier commitment to Black than Fabiano’s or Shiki’s. So, the first question is, stick with mono-Red or splash for Black cards?
The advantage of splashing for Black is that you get access to some strategies which mono-Red is not allowed. The most important of these is hand destruction. Cabal Therapy combines with cheap creatures to devastating effect against control or combo decks, and can be supplemented by Duress and Cranial Extraction. There are other useful cards, such as Living Death, Terminate, Perish and Chainer’s Edict, which offer opportunities for killing creatures which Red often has difficulty with, as well as Decompose and Reanimate against Reanimator decks and Dralnu’s Crusade to counteract Engineered Plague and Tendrils of Agony against CoP: Red.
The advantages of mono-Red are that you can play with more non-basic lands like Wasteland and Rishadan Port, which you can’t play in a two-color deck due to the need to find Black and Red mana, as well as greater consistency because you will never get color screwed, and the fact that there are more than enough Red and artifact cards that would be good to stick in without needing to look at Black cards as well.
Usually, I dislike diluting Red Decks, but I have to say that in this case, I’m convinced of the advantages of adding Black. The mono-Red beatdown deck is good, but as the above decklists show, Black cards can be added without reducing the aggressiveness of the deck – Piledriver, Warchief, Fanatic and friends are still all present and correct.
If you want to try a hyper-aggressive mono-Red deck, you could try the following:
4 – Prospector, Fanatic, Warchief, Piledriver, Flunkies, Aether Vial, Shrapnel Blast, Goblin Ringleader, Great Furnace, Wasteland
3 – Goblin Matron, Goblin Goon
2 – Chrome Mox
1 – Sparksmith, Goblin Sharpshooter
10 – Mountain
Sideboard:
4 – Cursed Scroll, Goblin King, Overload
3 – Sparksmith
Goblin King is for Engineered Plague, the rest is reasonably obvious. It’s not subtle, big or clever, but if you don’t like long rounds, worth thinking about.
Anyway, a Red/Black deck gives more options, and that’s what I wanted to focus on (five pages in and just getting to the point of the article, sorry ’bout that). Because I knew less about Red/Black decks than about the more straight forward process of summoning Goblins and attacking with them, I started by testing Ruel’s deck and Fabiano’s against Affinity, Desire, Life, blue-green Madness and Red Deck Wins. I didn’t test against Aluren or Rock – I don’t think Aluren will be a popular choice, and I don’t think Rock is good at the moment, and more time spent testing those matchups means less time tuning the deck and doing extra testing against the crucially important matchups. I was looking both for an idea of how good the various matchups were and also where the decks differed.
Desire was unproblematic for both decks – it’s possible that if I were better at playing the Desire deck then I could have won more, but small creatures + Cabal Therapy were every bit as difficult as I thought they would be to beat, and things like Burning Wish for Cranial Extraction, well, you know, just mean. Ruel won his Top 8 match 3-0, which backs this up.
Reanimator was unfavorable for Fabiano’s deck. It had opportunities to win via Cabal Therapy or just a bad draw for the Reanimator deck, but hands like Fanatic, Warchief, Warchief, Ringleader, 3 Mountain (a hand which you have to keep and is normally excellent) will usually lose to the Reanimator deck. In contrast, Ruel’s deck had a much better chance, this being the matchup where Burning Wish shines.
Affinity ended up pretty even – Burning Wish for Meltdown (which is a mis-spelling of the word “Pulverize”) wasn’t always as amazing as you might think, because we should know by now that playing a two-mana spell which does nothing to affect the board, followed by a three or more mana spell is sometimes not a devastating play, but instead a suggestion to the Affinity player along the lines of, “Please beat me up with all your artifact creatures and then make me lose all my remaining life by putting them in the graveyard”. Sparksmith was definitely above average, as was Goblin Ringleader. The matchup is like a slightly better version of the Affinity vs. Goblin Bidding match from Standard last year, for those who remember that. Although I haven’t tested after sideboarding, I reckon that if you expect a lot of Affinity, then between Pulverize and Powder Keg (no, I know, not a combo as such), you should have enough to counterbalance their Engineered Plagues and Chills, though it is worth noting that Fabiano’s deck is much better prepared for this as it can actually have sideboard cards, rather than just targets for Burning Wish.
For more information on these matchups, check out the reports from the professional tournaments that I have linked to below.
I tried to test against Life, and I have to confess myself baffled. I’d obviously never played the Life deck before, but I kept on getting hands like Task Force, Nomads-en-Kor, Living Wish, Eldarami’s Call, Enlightened Tutor, Brushland, Windswept Heath, which I assume is a good hand which you keep, and then getting beaten after not drawing more land or the relevant combo piece. It wasn’t a slaughter for the Goblin deck, but both versions won more than they lost, and while I could see that the discard helped make this a better matchup than for, say, Red Deck Wins, it didn’t feel like it should be an advantageous matchup.
I didn’t follow this up because I wanted to spend the bulk of the time testing against Madness and Red Deck Wins, both of which I think will be more popular than Life.
Madness came out as a close matchup. I was quite surprised by how bad Living Death was – I thought it would be amazing, but there were quite a few games where casting it would have helped not at all. Burning Wish was also mediocre. Casting Sparksmith early was definitely a sign of winning games, and for some reason Daze proved good as one-mana creature removal, counterspelling plenty of attempts by the Goblin deck to flood the board with enough creatures to stabilize. Basically, if the Madness deck was able to play a Wild Mongrel or Aquamoeba and quickly follow it up with an Arrogant Wurm or Roar of the Wurm, then the Goblin deck found it very difficult to keep up, and if not, then the Goblin deck would win. Again, it is worth noting that Aether Vial helps against the expected sideboard plan of Chill.
The really, properly bad matchup for both decks was Red Deck Wins. I was using Nakamura’s version from the Pro Tour, so didn’t have Lava Darts, which seem like they ought to be good, though it is surprising how few Goblins actually have one toughness. The Pillages were good in keeping Ruel’s deck from getting enough mana for Living Death, which was pretty much the only way that his deck could win. In one game I had to Burning Wish for a Reanimate to bring back a Mogg Fanatic, because all the other options were even worse. I think I stopped at 5-1 to Red Deck Wins, because while I could see how the Ruel deck could win the odd game either with Living Death or by consistently playing Goblin Ringleaders which reveal four Goblins while the Red Deck is manascrewed, the odds of it winning two games out of three, especially when the Red Deck got to sideboard, were so low as to make it not worth bothering.
Fabiano’s deck, on the other hand, did better. Not, like, anywhere near parity or anything, but Goblin Goons were better than the rubbish in the Ruel deck, and sometimes the Red Deck couldn’t keep up with a flood of early Goblins. Because I was using Firebolt in the Red Deck, Aether Vial was also good for things like end of opponent’s turn cast Piledriver, untap, play Warchief and another Piledriver. It was, though, still an uphill struggle against a deck with 4 Lavamancers and 4 Scrolls, each of which can kill nearly every Goblin without costing the Red Deck a card. I found it often possible to get ahead on life, but then the other problem is that there aren’t actually any burn spells in the Goblin deck, making it difficult to finish an opponent with an active Cursed Scroll off.
So overall, the Goblin deck looks like a possible choice – good to okay matchups against most different strategies that you might encounter. Although it did less well in the Pro Tour, the deck that Gerald Fabiano designed looks like it has some advantages over the deck that Olivier Ruel played. Ruel’s deck is weaker against combo and control decks, particularly Reanimator decks, but better versus some of the more popular decks which are even or difficult matchups for the deck.
I haven’t mentioned Shiki’s deck yet, but I’d now like to bring that in to see if any of the problems that we’ve identified can be solved by looking at it.
I think that the maindeck Cabal Therapies that Ruel and Fabiano have are important to retain instead of the Powder Kegs which Shiki has, though that depends on whether you expect to face control and combo decks or aggressive decks. Shiki and Ruel use Chrome Mox to speed up their decks, where Fabiano uses Aether Vial. After playing with Aether Vial, I was very impressed at its ability to deploy an enormous stream of Goblins and also to get round Chill.
What I like most, though, about Shiki’s deck are the Vampiric Tutors. I appreciated the ability to search for the perfect card which Ruel’s deck has and Fabiano’s deck lacks, especially given the wide range of decks which you will face in the current Extended environment. Equally, Burning Wish is slow and forces you to take up huge amounts of sideboard space. The combination of a Goblin army, efficient hand destruction and the ability to Tutor up an answer to anything is an extremely appealing one.
So here’s the version which I’ve put together to test. The Vampiric Tutors can fetch Sparksmith against Affinity or Madness, Ringleader if you need to restock on Goblins, Living Death if you really need a late game finisher and Cursed Scroll against Red Deck Wins, which is the best way I can think for you to win more games before sideboarding. But their main advantage is after sideboarding (which is why the third Tutor is in the sideboard) when you can bring in whichever silver bullet you think will best serve to wreck your opponent. The mana may need fine-tuning, and this is intended as a starting point for you to customize as you want with your favorite sideboard cards to beat the decks which you expect to face, not to assemble card for card as written below and automatically win a qualifier. It is an attempt, though, to combine the best ideas of the top American, French and Japanese pros in the service of beating people with Goblins, and, if nothing else, gives an idea about how you might go about turning those Pro decks into something which is just right for you.
4 Mogg Fanatic
4 Goblin Piledriver
4 Goblin Warchief
3 Skirk Prospector
3 Goblin Matron
3 Goblin Ringleader
2 Goblin Goon
2 Mogg Flunkies
1 Sparksmith
1 Siege-Gang Commander
4 Aether Vial
4 Cabal Therapy
2 Vampiric Tutor
1 Cursed Scroll
1 Living Death
4 Bloodstained Mire
4 Sulfurous Springs
1 Shadowblood Ridge
2 Swamp
8 Mountain
2 Rishadan Port
Sideboard:
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Ensnaring Bridge
1 Pyrostatic Pillar
1 Cranial Extraction
1 Pulverize
1 Perish
1 False Cure (almost certainly drivel, but I just got really entertained by the thought that if you tutor for this, Life decks cannot actually win unless they have an Orim’s Chant)
1 Dralnu’s Crusade
2 Flametongue Kavu
2 Sparksmith
3 Fledgling Dragon
Until next time, may your Tutor find you the Goblin you require,
Take care
Dan Paskins
Bibliography (with thanks to the Orcish Librarian for compiling this) :
Ruel vs Affinity deck, where the Goblin deck wins
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgevent/ptcol05/fm14
More info about the fortunes of the Goblin decks at Pro Tour: Columbus
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgevent/ptcol05/blog1
Goblins vs, um, Spellweaver Helix
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=sideboard/gpoka04/r7fm1
Goblins vs Reanimator
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=sideboard/gpoka04/r9fm1
Goblins vs Red Deck Wins
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=sideboard/gpoka04/r12fm1
Goblins vs Reanimator
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=sideboard/gpoka04/r14fm1
Final of Grand Prix: Okayama
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=sideboard/gpoka04/fin
Ruel vs a Desire deck
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgevent/ptcol05/qf4
Ruel vs Affinity, where the Affinity deck wins
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgevent/ptcol05/sf1
Mike Flores – Fun with Vampiric Tutor
http://www.starcitygames.com/php/news/expandnews.php?Article=8528
Me – Translating Testing into Results
http://www.starcitygames.com/php/news/expandnews.php?Article=7133
Zvi Mowshowitz – The Red Army (only if you have Brainburst premium membership)
http://www.brainburst.com